“Too many years.”
“Well, a long time. You were an old hand when I was still heating up zircons and selling them as diamonds to jewelers who didn’t know better. I’m just getting into the big play.”
“Who’ve you worked with?”
“I was up in Oregon. Portland. I was with Red Jamison and Phil Fayre and some other guys. I don’t know if you know them.” I knew Red and Phil. “We had this wire, it was the first job I worked with an elaborate store arrangement. The first one where I had a big piece of the action.”
“What did you do?”
“I was inside. Red did the roping, Phil and I and half the people on the Coast were inside the store. We took this wholesale druggist for seventy-five thou and a few other mooches for ten or twenty apiece. It was beautiful the way it worked. The whole thing, the bit about a man at the track with a transistor set-up that got the results before the store did. It all worked like a beautiful piece of machinery. It was sweet.”
He told me all about it. The wire con is one of the three standard long cons, and as old as you can get. You keep being surprised when it still works after all those years. He told me all the cute little details and I could tell just how much of a kick it was for him, a kick to pull it off, a kick to remember it and talk about it. In a lot of ways he was the same kid I’d known before, in love with the whole pattern of the life, in love with the whole idea of being with it. I tried to remember if I had been like that once, all enthusiasm and excitement. It didn’t seem possible.
“But that’s history,” he said. “Let me tell you what I’ve got on the stove now. You know the Canadian moose pasture bit, don’t you?”
“I worked it once.”
“That’s what I heard. How did you work it? Stock?”
“Uranium stocks.”
“You’ve heard it worked with land?”
“I know somebody was doing it that way somewhere in the East. It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”
“Just about,” he said. “It’s also just about played out, although there are still a few boiler rooms going in Toronto. I was inside of one with half a dozen phones going full-time.”
“Is that what you want to set up?”
He laughed. “No, this is nothing like that. This is quicker and neater and easier and the score is a lot bigger. This is a fresh wrinkle on the whole thing. I’ll tell you, Johnny, this is one I dreamed up all by myself. I heard this girl’s story—”
“What girl?”
“A girl I met in Vegas. I’ll get to that. I heard her story, and I got a picture of this mooch in my mind, and I just let it lay around there. I wasn’t in Vegas to line up a con and I wasn’t there for a woman, either. I never pull a job in Vegas, or anywhere else in the state. That place is strictly for gambling for me.”
“You gamble a lot?”
“I’m a high roller when I’m not working. Everybody has a weakness, Johnny. On the con or off it, everybody has one thing that gets to him. Women or liquor or gambling or something. The trouble is when you’ve got more than one vice. You know, I’m getting way off the track here. Let me just give you a fast picture. It’s getting late and all, and you must be pretty beat, and I’m not so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed myself. I’ll just sketch it in for you.”
He gave me just the outline. He ran through it very quickly, very sketchily. He knew what he was doing. He was working me the same way you work a mark at the beginning, the same way a fisherman works a trout. Just teasing, poking the bait around, giving a flash of it and then jerking it away before you can even make up your mind whether or not to bite. I knew I was being hustled. It didn’t bother me.
For one thing, it was impossible to dislike Doug Rance. He was too genuinely charming. A confidence man has to have one of two things going for him. He can be so tremendously charming that the mark likes him at first meeting, or he can be so obviously honest and sincere that the mark trusts him from the opening whistle. If the mooch likes you, or if he trusts you, you are halfway home; the rest is just mechanics.
Doug made it on charm. I was the other way, I was a man people were likely to trust. I don’t know why this is so, but it is. I’ve always played things that way, pushing the honest-and-sincere bit, but you can’t make it on acting talent alone.
Charm and sincerity. The best two-handed cons feature a pair of men who complement one another in this respect, one of them charming and one of them sincere. Doug wanted me in this one, and he probably knew what he was doing in picking me. The odds were that we would work well together.
I let him get all the way through the pitch and I listened to him all the way. He skipped most of the details, so it was hard to tell if the thing was as good as it sounded right off the bat. There could be snags he hadn’t thought of, rough spots he’d glossed over. On the surface, though, the thing looked beautiful.
“It’s a new one,” I told him.
“I thought it was.”
“Of course, I’ve been out of circulation for seven years. But I think you actually found something new.”
“Do you like it?”
“Yes,” I said. And lit a cigarette and added, “But I’m afraid it’s not for me. I’m just not buying.”
“Oh, I know,” he said easily. “I just wanted your opinion. I wish I could have you in on it, but you can’t win them all.” He got to his feet. “I’m going to split, Johnny. I’m halfway dead. I’ve got a room over at the Mountain Lodge.”
“Where do you go from here?”
“I’m not sure. I figure I’ll be in town until tomorrow night, anyway. Maybe we’ll get together, huh?”
What a sweet soft hustler he was. I stood up. “Drop around. We’ll have lunch.”
“Fine.”
When he had his hand on the knob I gave him the first nibble. The words just came out by themselves. What I said was, “Just for curiosity, how big do you think you’d score on this one?”
He pretended to think. “Hard to say. I know what I figured your end at.”
“Oh?”
“About thirty thou,” he said.
Three
I tried not to think about it. I listened as his car pulled away, and I blocked out the echo of his parting line, and I got undressed and crawled into bed and found out in no time at all that I wasn’t going to drop off to sleep all that easily. I flipped the light back on and killed some time working on my correspondence course homework. Actually I was taking two courses at once, one in hotel and restaurant management and one in basic accounting. I worked out four of the accounting problems before my eyes started backing up on me. I lit a fresh cigarette and sat down on the edge of the bed.
So I thought about some of the things I hadn’t wanted to think about. Like how long it would take to save thirty thousand dollars, and how old I would be when I had it. Fifty at the earliest, and probably a lot more like fifty-five. I was forty-two, and forty-two was still young enough for big plans and hard work, but fifty — well, fifty was a lot closer to being old. And fifty-five was closer still.
I thought about spending another ten years in that little room, scrimping and saving to beat hell. Adding up score sheets at the Boulder Bowl, grabbing quick lunches at diners and coffee pots. Dreaming through correspondence courses.
I had liked that life, too. But a man can endure many things day by day that become unthinkable when seen as a larger chunk of time. My life was all right as long as I lived it a day at a time. See it as ten years of the same thing, with Bannion selling his place to somebody else somewhere along the line, with the dream evaporating and the correspondence courses discontinued and nothing left but the habit; work and sleep and save. See it that way and the window grows bars and the door locks itself and the eight-dollar room turns itself into a cell.